RETHINKING the OPPIDA

Abstract

Summary: The appearance of large sites known as oppida, and generally qualified as urban or proto‐urban, is a central feature of all accounts of late Iron Age Europe. But the category of oppidum groups together sites that are very diverse in morphology, scale and function, and excludes other sites that share many of the same features, but lack fortifications and/or are located outside the supposed heartland of the oppida civilisation. Few oppida seem to be at the centre of differentiated settlement networks of the kind usually associated with urbanism, and few display a higher level of intra‐site zoning than do rural farms or hamlets. A reassessment of late La Tène settlement, focusing on its technological and cultural unity, contributes to an analysis of late prehistoric Europe which stresses the contrasts between the social trajectories of temperate European and Mediterranean societies.